I’ve neglected my little blog for almost three months, and I miss it. I have big plans for Delilah, bad hetaira par excellence. Delilah intrigued me as a little girl.

The book I read when I learned to read was Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,

The book I read while I was learning to read.

not Milton’s work, but a retelling of Sacred Scripture by the unimaginative Watchtower, Bible, and Tract Society. I’m grateful to this book for many reasons, the most important being the love of Bible stories it fostered in me. Another big reason is that the illustrations in this book told me that I wanted to be a bad woman because bad women were unbelievably beautiful, glamorous, and feminine in a truly sensual way.

Every time I saw the illustrations of Delilah or the Whore of Babylon, I wanted to be beautiful, just like them, in their clinging yet diaphanous gowns, their luxuriant hair piled high in loose curls, their eyelashes longer than I-10. Yep, the bad women were gorgeous and proud of it.

I can’t find any Watchtower, Bible, & Tract Society illustrations from PLPR online, so I’ll have to make do with Dore. He’s by far a finer artist than the Witness illustrator, but his women have the same sort of sensual femininity.

Dore's Samson & Delilah

I’ll inaugurate my study of Delilah, Bad Hetaira, with a poem I wrote a few years ago that was inspired by Delilah’s story.

Cunning

I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty-a sunken beauty.
Jean Genet

Returning from a night of foraging
the tarantula plugs his burrow, a loose
webbing of silk.

Samson’s locks pulled taut
the nerves
of his enemies, their fear
quivering
along their arms and legs.

The wasp thrums the tangled frets
of the spider’s thicket. She knows
music to lure
the spider
out.

No resources against the wasp,
no way of knowing what  his desire
what  his harvester.

She strokes the tangled harp
like Delilah at Samson’s brow.
Where could his head be safer
than in a woman’s lap?

The tarantula emerging,

the wasp—
long, strong,
sharp stinger
piercing the spider
near the base of a leg
pumping
paralyzing venom
into the insect

The wasp drags
the limp
but living
spider into
his own burrow

lays on his body
a single egg,
seals the burrow.

Where could a spider be safer
than in the middle of his own silk?

And Samson? Was he held
inside her beauty, beatified
by her gaze, her touch?
Or was he—ex-stasis—paralyzed
by her perfect symmetry?

Yet her radiance sealed his eyes.
Imprinted on his memory
her adornment flashing,
he saw the soft curve
of her shoulder. In a room
all eyes watched her,
scent of her skin enticing, exciting,
his whole body alert
not knowing whether he be predator
or prey

The current quickens into pain,
fades. The nerves
cease their charged messages.

The tarantula
his brain a mote
tangled on the air,

his purpose
living host, wombing.

His cunning sealed,
Samson, blind to the danger of her mystery,
fettered and mute.

A spider’s desire spun
into mother’s milk
for the wasp’s only child.